Category Archives: Cloud

PowerBiz Solutions today announced that it has successfully achieved the Microsoft silver Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions competency. Partners demonstrating professional and proficient capability in assisting small and medium sized businesses moving to the Cloud can attain this certification upon satisfying established performance criteria and providing customer references.

The competency demonstrations the continued dedication and commitment to excellence in enabling businesses to use technology as a business advantage to achieve their targets and objectives. PowerBiz Solutions continues to provide high quality technical expertise to enable small and medium business to be efficient and effective in the use of Microsoft on-premises and cloud technologies based on Windows Server, Windows 10, Office 365 and Azure.

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I will be presenting a session titled “The Best of Both Worlds – Maximising Microsoft Technologies in Hybrid Deployments SMBs. The session is not just for IT Professionals. If you are a small business owner, there will be some great nuggets of information to take back to your business for further thought and planning with your IT provider.

“Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers. “

“We are announcing the removal of current limits on external users for all SharePoint Online plans. Specifically, the changes will be as follows. The external users limit for Office 365 Small Business and Small Business Premium will change from 500 to Unlimited. The external users limit for Office 365 Midsize Business and Office 365 Enterprise plans (including E1 – E4, A2-A4, G1-G4, and SharePoint Online Plan 1 and Plan 2) will change from 10,000 to Unlimited.“

The DR to Azure functionality in ASR builds on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server Hyper-V Replica, and Microsoft Azure to ensure that our customers can leverage existing IT investments while still helping them optimize precious CAPEX and OPEX spent in building and managing secondary datacenter sites.

The GA release also brings significant additions to the already expansive list of ASR’s DR to Azure features:

NEWTrack Initial Replication Progress as virtual machine data gets replicated to a customer-owned and managed geo-redundant Azure Storage account. This new feature is also available when configuring DR between on-premises private clouds across enterprise sites

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Join me this coming Thursday 20 March 2014 for an online presentation “Virtualization with Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials for Small Business.” You can register for the session here – https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032577184&Culture=en-AU

I will be presenting the session in conjunction with the MVP Community Camp 2014, where MVPs from around the Asia Pacific Region will present online and live sessions on a plethora of topics.

Join us on Saturday 22 March 2014, if you are in any major city for live sessions – Especially if you live in Adelaide!

For more information, visit http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/ComCamp2014.aspx to register.

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I had to diagnose some issue that a client was having with Office 365 Exchange. A lot of features are found “under the hood” and are accessible using PowerShell. Here are some common basic comamnds that will help in connecting to your Exchange Online account. Thanks to Robert Crane, Office 365 MVP, for his helpful blog (http://blog.ciaops.com/2012/09/configuring-power-shell-access-in.html) in getting me started.

After this, you can manage your Exchange service with more advanced commands. For example, I had to cancel forwarding on a user account (which I could not see using the Web App or in Outlook) using the following command – Set-Mailbox -Identity <mailbox@mydomain.com> -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $false -ForwardingSMTPAddress $null

I was also able to check the Out of Office settings using this command –

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Sometimes, the domain hosting company is not able to properly configure autodiscover CNAME records to enable the domain to work properly with the Office 2010 auto configuration wizard. In this case, it may be necessary to manually configure Outlook 2010 to connect to the Office 365 servers.